48 the ultimate outsider." Wow! Don De- Lillo as almost Ian to Lee Harvey Oswald. "I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind," DeLillo said. "That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing agaInst what power represents, and often what govern- ment represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consaousness has come to mean. In that sense, ifwe're bad citizens, we're doing our job. Will also said I blamed America for Lee Harvey Oswald. But I don't blame America for Lee Harvey Oswald, I blame America for George Will. I don't think there is any sense in 'Libra' in which America is the motive force that sends Oswald up to that sixth-floor win- dow. In fact, Oswald is interesting because he was, at least by his own rights, a strongly political man, who not only defected to the Soviet Union but tried to assassinate the right-wing figure General Walker about seven months before the assassina- tion of President Kennedy. I think in that seven months his life unravelled. I think he lost a grip on his political con- sciousness, and on almost everything else around him. And I think he became the forerunner of all those soft white young men of the late sixties and early seven- ties, who went around committing crimes of convenience, shooting at whatever po- litical figure or celebrity happened to drift into range." DeLillo said he didn't pretend to know the answer to the assassinat:1on rid- dle, though he thought there was prob- ably a second gunman. When DeLillo visited the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository museum, he wrote in the guestbook, "Still waiting for the man on the grassy knoll." D ELILLO has no idea how "U nder- world" will be absorbed into the culture, if at all. He seems not to worry about it. In fact, he doesn't think that the Increasingly marginal status of the seri- 0us novelist is necessarily awful. By be- ing marginal, he may end up being more significant, more respected, sharper in his observations. Not long ago, DeLillo wrote a letter to his friend the novelist Jonathan Franzen. Franzen is a younger writer, one with great verbal skill and narrative imagination, and DeLillo's letter sounds very much hke reassurance to a successor: The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big SOCIal novel fifteen years from now, it'll prob- ably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us-we won't stop because the market dried up The writer leads, he doesn't fol- low. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social nove11ives, but only barely, sur- viving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one. . . . Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some under culture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. P. S. If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talk1ng about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end. In "Libra," in "Mao II," and now in "U nderworld," DeLillo has increasingly brought the world of power and celeb- rity into his work-the world of contem- porary history. It's likely that he will con- tinue in that direction. "I think the press of public events has got stronger in the last several decades," he told me. "It's the power of the media, the power of television. But also, I think, there's something in people that, per- haps, has shifted. People seem to need news, any kind-bad news, sensational- istic news, overwhelming news. It seems to be that news is a narrative of our time. I t has almost replaced the novel, replaced discourse between people. It replaced families. It replaced a slower, more care- fully assembled way of communicating, a more personal way of communicating. In the fifties, news was a kind of sinuous part of life. It flowed in and out in a sort of ordinary, unremarkable way. And now news has impact, largely because of tele- vision news Mter the earthquake in San Francisco, they showed one house burn- ing, over and over, so that your TV set became a kind of instrument of apoca- lypse. This happens repeatedly in those endless videotapes that come to life of a bank robbery, or a shooting, or a beat- ,") ..t''t \\\\ ' b , '\ \\\ \ ' , \ \ , " . - ':-- ,\, 11.' . . -,-;;- , .... -- ..;... '!:..:.-:._..-=:'--- ...... ' ' __ - .:. _ --7;. - ,.::........... ..;..- -----;:<'--. { ""''='' -- ' :.. -==..:==. . r( _ = -= " "t:". .:,,-: _,I .."""'""" - \ I " ;, '- -= 2 I , ". 'I þ.OO:'-__-==' ,.., " \1 I " I. ; i 4 " . Ij! \ . ' .9/." . " I I 'f ! 1.\ _ '-!.-,. - __ 'I - .... .=- ....? --=- ' e :::;;':!!:"-:: - .... - , ...-.......... .. :::' L A 1\ Þ Y -.. ing. They repeat, and it's as though they're speeding up time in some way. I think it's induced an apocalyptic sense in people that has nothing to do with the end of the millennium. And it makes us-it makes us consumers of a certain type. We consume these acts of violence. It's like buying products that in fact are images and they are produced in a mass- market kind of fashion. But it's also real, it's real life. It's as though this were our last experience of nature: seeing a guy with a gun totally separate from choreo- graphed movie violence. It's all that we've got left of nature, in a strange way. But it's all happening on our TV set." The day we were talking, television was filled with images of the fashion designer Gianni Versace shot dead on the street in Miami Beach. DeLillo was interested not so much in the fallen designer as in the in- stantaneous packaging of the murder, its sudden appearance on every screen and thus in millions of conversations. "People talk about the killing, but they don't talk about what it does to them, to the way they think, and feel, and fear," he said. "They don't talk about what it creates in a larger sense. The truth is, we don't quite know how to talk about this, ] don't believe. Maybe that's why some of us wnte fiction." "Underworld" ends with the fall of the Soviet Union and its conflict with the West. As DeLillo thinks about the era we're liv- ing in, and writing about it, he has also been thinking about a passage in Hermann Broch's novel "The Death of Virgil." "He h ' 1 d ,,, uses t e term no onger an not yet, DeLillo said. "I think he's referring to the fact that his poet, Virgil, is in a state of delirium, no longer quite alive, and not yet dead. But I think he may also be referring to the interim between paganism and Christianity. And I think of this 'no lon- ger and not yet' in terms of no longer the Cold War and not yet whatever will fol- low." But six months after finishing "Un- derworld," he added, the germ of some- thing really new has not yet shown itself. On the way to the station to drop me off for the train back from Westchester County to the city, DeLillo said, 'What happens in between is I drift, I feel a little aimless. I feel a little stupid, be- cause my mind is at odds. It's not trained on a daily basis to concentrate on some- thing, so I feel a little dumb. Time passes in a completely different way. I can't ac- count for a day, a given day. At the end of a day, I don't know what I did." .